Then, let’s say you get a new VP of Marketing, and in your first meeting together she asks you to explain your PPC strategy and ways you’d improve it.

You spend all day optimizing PPC campaigns, but you’ve rarely needed to step back, evaluate, or justify your PPC strategy to others.

So self doubt kicks in, and you start asking yourself questions like:

“Do I really understand my PPC strategy?”

“How can I explain my approach to this VP without getting into the weeds?”

“Do I know what my next steps are?”

Without a clear understanding of how you’re approaching your paid spend, stakeholders only see your hefty budget, leaving you under pressure to deliver results.

In this post I’ll cover a framework for clarifying and communicating your PPC strategy to any and all stakeholders to prove confidence and good understanding. Because—no matter how complex your plan— stakeholders on your team should ideally understand how you’re defining success, and how to support you in execution.

Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media agrees:

“Clarity is key. Keep [your paid strategy] simple and explicit. If there’s anything confusing about your plan, you’ll pay for it later in wasted time and/or budget.”

Further, this post will walk you through the Paid Media Cube framework for identifying any opportunities you might be leaving on the table.

Four questions to clarify your PPC strategy

To better clarify and communicate your PPC plans, first answer these four questions:

Who are you trying to reach?

Where are you going to reach them?

How are you going to reach them?

What are you going to offer them?

If you can’t answer the above in one to two sentences, your strategy is not clear. Go back to the drawing board, go through your campaigns, and get these answers.

Now I know, at this stage, you’re likely thinking:

“It’s not that simple, Tom. My PPC strategy is more complex than these four questions!”

“We are running PPC ads on several channels like AdWords, Bing, Facebook, and Display.”

“We are targeting multiple buyer journey stages such as awareness, consideration, and decision stages. We can’t possibly answer four questions for everything.”

To ensure the aforementioned four questions are helpful, I’ve found it’s best you further visualize and map every piece of your PPC approach into buckets. Beyond explaining your strategy, you need a tool to help you identify opportunities for improvement and growth.

The Paid Media Cube below helps you visualize your PPC traffic at the intersection of both your traffic channels and buyer journey stage. Once filled out for your paid campaigns, it can help you spot gaps and opportunities for growth.

Below is an example of what your campaigns would look like using the Paid Media Cube. I’ve mapped it out below as though we were planning paid spend for our junk food clothing line…

Looking at Paid Media Cube for the first time, you likely have 3 questions:

#1. Why do the names vary in all squares?

The names you see in each square stand in for campaign names. You may have a different terminology because of targeting or your naming conventions.

#2. How do I fill in each square?

Consider all the campaigns you have in your paid media accounts and think about the buyer journey stage your target would be in. Then map each campaign group to the appropriate square for the right stage and the right channel. Of course this leads us to the third and the most important question.

Once you map your campaigns to the Paid Media Cube, you can grow in few different ways:

Launch campaigns for a few buyer stages within the same traffic channel. If you notice are only running campaigns in the decision and consideration stage, you can expand into the awareness stage to ensure you’re not missing out on any opportunities.

Launch a new PPC channel you haven’t tried yet. If you are only running campaigns on paid search and paid social channels, test the display channel.

Expand your PPC channel approach. I.e. If you are running paid search campaigns on AdWords, replicate them in Bing Ads.

For best results combine the four questions with the Cube

Now you have two important tools: the Paid Media Cube and four questions to ask yourself about your campaigns.

Since each square in the Paid Media Cube represents a different stage of buyer intent, you’ll want to answer the four questions for each square.

For example, your company comes up with a new Chicken Ramen Sweatshirt product line, and you want to target geeks, EDM music fans, and junk food eaters on Facebook (paid social traffic in the awareness stage).

Chicken Ramen Sweatshirt (via Beloved Shirts)

Here is where your campaigns would hypothetically fit into the Paid Media Cube:

Answer the four strategy questions for each square above…(via SCUBE Marketing)

The answers to the four strategy questions would look like this:

Who are you trying to reach? Geeks, EDM music fans, and junk food eaters.

Where are you going to reach them? Paid Social (Facebook Ads).

How are you going to reach them? Target pages about geeky gadgets, EDM music, and junk food.

What are you going to offer them? Free ideabook with apparel ideas featuring Ramen noodles along with a 20% coupon for their first order.

Overall, after you complete one square, repeat the question process until you can clearly articulate the factors of your PPC strategy in full.

Stay ahead of the game

Once you have clarity yourself, you can easily communicate your PPC strategy to others.

Paid media marketers face pressure from all sides. Not only are you expected to produce results, but it’s also up to you to prove the value of your campaigns to those without a thorough understanding of your efforts.

Using the four questions I outlined above, alongside the Paid Media Cube, you’ll have a great start for clearly outlining your PPC strategy to others, but even if you’re fairly autonomous or independent the Cube will help ensure you’re running a full funnel of campaigns and not missing any potential opportunities.

]]>http://unbounce.com/ppc/ppc-strategy-template/feed/64 Ways to Use Typefaces on Your Landing Page to Elevate Your Brandhttp://unbounce.com/design/4-ways-to-use-typefaces-on-your-landing-page-to-elevate-your-brand/
http://unbounce.com/design/4-ways-to-use-typefaces-on-your-landing-page-to-elevate-your-brand/#commentsFri, 24 Nov 2017 08:00:55 +0000http://unbounce.com/?p=66692/There’s a reason you can recognize an Apple ad right away. Same with Nike and Airbnb. A big part of that is because of imagery, copy, and layout, but typefaces play a huge role as well.

Although the ROI of having a strong brand is harder to measure than, say, clear button copy, it’s telling that some of the most respected companies in the world have strong design cultures and distinct aesthetics.

Examples of Apple and Nike’s on-brand design aesthetics.

When designing landing pages, you need them to be on-brand, pixel for pixel. Great design is often a tell-tale sign of more sophisticated marketing (and can give you an easier time getting conversions as it can help convey that you’re well established). One of the most obvious elements that need complete design versatility on your landing pages is your typeface.

This is why Unbounce launched built-in Google fonts in September of this year. Now there are 840+ fonts to choose from for all your text and button needs, straight from the text editor’s properties panel:

For some inspiration on how to best use this newfound world of hundreds of fonts, we’re passing the mic to some of our in-house designers at Unbounce. See what they have to say about everything from the best fonts for creating a visual hierarchy to how your text can communicate emotion. Plus see what types of fonts they’re excited to use in their upcoming design work in the builder.

Break the rules where possible

Cesar Martinez, Senior Art Director here at Unbounce, hears a lot of talk about rules. But they’re not the be-all-and-end-all. As he tells us:

“Often when discussing typography with my peers, I hear about all sorts of design principles, some of which I’ve always challenged myself to learn almost as commandments. I realized that is very easy to fall into a vortex of overused principles of visual communication that can potentially damage your integrity (or what some call originality) as a brand.
When designing landing pages that need to feel especially branded or out of the box, try breaking these rules every now and then (then A/B test to see what works and doesn’t). For example, you could use more than two typefaces in one paragraph, break the kerning on your headers, use a big bold-ass serif on a semi-black background and see how it looks with a thin handmade brushed calligraphic font as the subheader…I know it sounds crazy, but this can lead to unexpected results and it’s something I’m really looking forward to doing with the builder’s new built-in Google fonts.”

Some of Cesar’s favorite out-of-the-box examples of typography?

“I love what ILOVEDUST does when it comes to typography. I also recommend reading Pretty Ugly2 as an introspection of “bad” typography applications that succeed in the way they communicate a visual idea.”

Which font is Cesar most excited to use in the builder? A few: Roboto, Playfair, and Abril Fatface.

Use fewer fonts to clarify information hierarchy

Denise Villanueva, a Product Designer, created our Unbounce Academy with clear and consistent hierarchy in mind.

“Good typography is the most straightforward way to create a clear content hierarchy. That, above anything else, should be the main criteria of choosing typefaces for your brand.”

Denise provided some specific pointers to help you achieve sound content hierarchy on your landing pages:

“When in doubt, using one font family in 2–3 weights (or two font families in 1-2 weights) will work the vast majority of the time. Using more than three typefaces can be distracting and chaotic — avoid doing it.”

As an example, Unbounce’s Fitspo template features the Raleway font (in all caps for headers and sentence case for regular body copy) and a clear, attention-grabbing header with supporting sections that guide you further down the page. Think of it as presenting your information in clearly defined levels that are easy to read.

Give someone all the feels with typographic details

For Denis Suhopoljac, our Principal User Experience Designer, using the right typography can evoke feelings in your audience:

“Typefaces are all about composition, harmony, and mood rolled into one. By matching the right typography traits with voice, style and tone of a brand, you can enhance the wit, humor, or seriousness of a piece of copy. When it’s done right, typography makes your copy (and your entire brand experience) legible, readable, and appealing.”

Different fonts convey different types of emotions via text — what do these typefaces make you think of? Professionalism? Reliability? Playfulness? Timelessness?

Try incorporating typeface as part of your message

To Ainara Sáinz, our Interactive Designer, good typography can do double duty and save you from having to use other supporting imagery.

“If typography is done well, you don’t always need extra elements like images, backgrounds or even colors to reinforce the message. And sometimes, the execution is so flawless that the audience might not even need to know how to read to understand and feel the message behind it. Like Ji Lee’s Word as Image project—just… wow.”

Image via Ji Lee’s Word as Image project.

Your landing pages can make use of stunning fonts too

Having solid branding does wonders for a brand’s credibility, and our customers have been telling us that they want to get in on the action. Get into the builder today to explore the 840+ new typeface options available, and find your favourite pairings for your next landing page.

If you’re a PPC strategist, your client’s campaigns live and die by the strength of the landing pages. If you drop the perfect paid audience on a page with no offer (or an unclear one), you’ll get a 0% conversion rate no matter how your ads perform.

The problem is that as AdWords account managers, we can be pretty limited in our ability to change landing pages. In this role, we typically lack the budget, resources, and expertise needed to affect what’s often the root cause of failing campaigns.

So how do you rescue your AdWords campaigns from bad landing pages without also becoming a landing page designer or a conversion rate optimization expert?

Below are three techniques you can use to reveal some insight, change performance yourself, or influence more relevant, better converting landing pages for AdWords.

If the keyword spends more than $100 and doesn’t result in a sale, remove keyword.

Whether it’s automated or a manual check, the process is the same: “optimize” by getting rid of what doesn’t convert.

But this assumes that the landing page your ad points to is perfectly optimized and relevant to every keyword that might be important to your audience — a pretty tall order. But what if your target audience is searching for your offer with your seemingly “dud” keyword, and you’re driving them to an incorrect or incomplete landing page that doesn’t reflect the keyword or the search intent behind it?

The “Ugly Duckling” is a check you can do when your keyword isn’t hitting the performance metrics you want. It will help you figure out if your keyword is a swan, or a wet rat you need to purge from your aquatic friends.

As an example, let’s say your client is a fruit vendor, with an AdWords campaign driving coupon downloads. Here’s the ad group for concord grapes:

Concord Grape Ad Group

The keyword phrase ‘organic concord grapes’ has a lot of search volume, but it’s performing horribly at $695 per coupon download!

An AdWord’s “rule” pausing or deleting what doesn’t work would wipe out this keyword in no time. But, before assuming a wet rat, this is where you’d take look at the (hypothetical) landing page:

The hypothetical landing page for the fruit vendor’s Ad campaign.

The landing page never mentions your grapes are organic! No wonder your visitors aren’t converting. This is poor message match from your ad.

In this case, simply adding the high-volume, highly relevant term “organic” to your landing page is much smarter than negative matching the term your audience is using to find your product. There could be several keywords you’re bidding on that could use this swan/wet rat treatment.

Further investigation needed: Assuming your grapes are organic (or more broadly, the keyword is indeed relevant to your offer), there are several things you can try, such as:

Altering your ad headline: If it’s not already in there, test adding your keyword to your ad’s headline. This should drive a better quality score and cost per click, and you can see whether it affects CTR for the keyword. Because making changes to your landing page could require more rigorous review than changing ad copy, this can be a good first step.

Ad group break-out: If your keyword phrase is particularly long or is unrelated to the other keywords in your ad group, break it into a new ad group before including it in your headline.

Data-based landing page recommendation: If your keyword performance improves with the ad-specific steps above, you should now have the data you need to get your client or designer/team to feature the keyword prominently on the landing page. In the case of our example, “organic” can be easily added to the headline on the landing page.

In other cases, building out a separate, more specific landing page to address individual keywords could be more appropriate.

Depending on relevancy and search volume, you can incorporate the theme of the keyword throughout the landing page and offer.

Search term deep dive: Go a step further and examine the search terms, not just the keywords, following the same process. Looking at the actual search terms that do drive spend and traffic can reveal potential exclusions, match type tightening, and keywords to add.

Hypothetically, here’s what performance could look like for our keyword once we’ve optimized the ad and resulting landing page to better reflect the product:

This keyword we were about to pause is now driving 1400+ downloads with a cost per download of the coupon. That’s below our target. Swan after all!

2. Learn about your audience with “mini-quiz” ad copy

A strong AdWords landing page isn’t just about following best practices or using slick templates. It should encompass user research, sales data, persuasive messaging, and a compelling offer, but you’ve got a trick up your sleeve: your ad copy.

Think of your ad copy as a quiz where you get to ask your audience what unique selling point is most important to them. With each ad click, you’re collecting votes for the best messaging, which can fuel key messages on your landing page.

To do this right, you have to have distinct messages and value propositions in your copy. For example, it makes no sense to run a test of these ad descriptions:

One of these ads will get a better click through rate than the others, but you’ve learned nothing.
A good ad copy quiz has distinct choices and results. You’ll want to challenge assumptions about your audience. Consider this other, better version of the quiz from the text ad example above:

(Version B) Get clear skin in just 3 days. Get your 1st shipment free. Order now!

Whether the winner is “#1 solution” or “Results in 3 days,” we’ve learned something about the priorities of our audience, and the learnings can be applied to improve the landing page’s headline and copy throughout. Rinse & repeat.

Turning your ads into mini-quizzes

See what your audience truly values by letting them vote with their click. Here are some ideas for value propositions to get you started with your ad copy quiz:

Note: I normally don’t suggest including messaging in your ad that isn’t reflected on the landing page (i.e. if your landing page doesn’t mention price, neither should your ad). However, if you don’t control the landing page as the paid media manager, the CTR of an ad copy test can point you in the right direction for what to add to your page, so it’s fair game in this instance.

3. “Tip the scales” with exactly enough information

There’s a widely-spread idea that landing pages for AdWords should be stripped of any features, links, or functionality other than a form. This is just not true, and blindly following this advice could be killing your conversion rates.

Basically, your page should have one purpose, and you should avoid distractions.

This is great advice, especially for people who are tempted to drive AdWords traffic to a home page with no real CTA. But I find it has been misinterpreted and misapplied all over the internet by people who’ve twisted it into an incorrect “formula”, i.e.:

He who has the fewest links and options on the landing page wins.

That’s not how it works. People need links, content, choice, and context to make a decision. Not all links are bad; I’ve doubled conversion rates just by diverting PPC traffic from dedicated LPs to the website itself.

The question is, how much information does a visitor need in order to take action?

Ultimately you want to “tip the scales” of the decision-making process for your visitor – getting rid of unnecessary distractions, but keeping those essential ingredients that will help them go from “no” to “yes” or even “absolutely.”

Here are 2 very common mistakes that are killing conversion rates on landing pages across the internet:

Mistake #1: Single-option landing pages

You’ve heard all about the paradox of choice and analysis paralysis. You know that when people have too many options, they’re more likely to choose none at all. But what happens when you have too few?

If you don’t see what you want, you’re also going to say “no.”

As an example (that you probably won’t see in the wild but it’s nice and easy to illustrate), someone’s Googled a pizza delivery service. But the landing page allows someone to order pepperoni and pepperoni only, and our vegetarian searcher leaves to order elsewhere.

At first glance, this might look like our “organic grapes” problem from earlier, but something different is at play.

Many AdWords ads today are driving to single-option landing pages, where the only choice is to take the offer exactly as-is. This can be fine when only one variation exists, or your visitors have a chance to narrow their choices later in the process.

But if your visitors’ search is more broad, don’t take away their options in an effort to simplify the page. You’ll miss out on potential sales, which is kind of the whole point of running a campaign.

Instead, driving to a category page, or one that gives your visitors (gasp) – choice! – will keep them engaged. You may also consider creating several different types of landing pages for each specific option you offer to get specific after someone’s narrowed down their options via a broader landing page.

Mistake #2: The not-enough-info landing page

Another case of “When good landing page principles go bad” is the stripped-down, bare-bones dedicated landing page that has no useful information.

A disturbing and growing trend is for AdWords landing pages to feature no navigation, links, details, or information. There’s not even a way to visit the company domain from the landing page. This is a problem, because as the saying goes: A confused mind says no.

What’s going through your site visitors’ minds when they get to a landing page and can’t find what they need?

A landing page without enough information can be just as bad (or worse) than a landing page with too much.

Whether your traffic is warm or cold, coming from an email campaign or paid ads, arriving at your home page or a dedicated landing page, your visitors need to trust that you can solve their problems before they’ll convert on your offer.

Overall, just because someone’s clicked on an AdWords ad doesn’t mean they have fewer questions or less of a need for product details than if they came in from another channel. Remember to cover all your details of your offer in a logical information hierarchy, and don’t be afraid to give your visitors options to explore important info via lightboxes, or links where appropriate.

Getting control over your landing pages for AdWords

As a PPC manager, you may not directly control the landing page, but you can remind your team to avoid conversion killers like:

Key questions from the top keywords that aren’t answered on the landing page

No clear reason to take action

Landing pages where choice is limited unnecessarily, leaving more questions than answers

Landing pages that don’t explain what will happen after a visitor takes action on the offer

As a savvy marketer, it’s our sincere hope you never start a campaign without a dedicated landing page for sending your paid traffic to. But — as you know — the job isn’t over once a landing page is created.

Ultimately you want to know whether you’ve got an especially high converting page, or if there’s anything specific you can improve. But it can be difficult to know what ‘good’ looks like, and you may not always have a second set of eyes to help you critique.

New: Try Unbounce’s Landing Page Analyzer

For years we’ve seen the need for a landing page audit tool or landing page grader of some sort, and so—after many months of development—we’re very pleased to unveil the Unbounce Landing Page Analyzer.

With this grader-style tool, you input your landing page URL (along with a few key details) and The Analyzer instantly delivers a comprehensive, personalized report with custom recommendations you can try today to increase your conversion rates.

Unlike other landing page reviews, The Analyzer is truly a deep dive into your performance.

Not only do you get a summary of how your page compares to others in your industry, but you also see important page performance insights including your landing page’s speed, load time, and page requests that may be slowing things down.

If The Analyzer discovers your images are too large (contributing to slow load time), your custom report will include compressed versions of all your images to replace quickly and get your page loading even faster.

Pictured: you’ll get custom, compressed images as part of your page analysis.

Wait, aren’t there other landing page graders out there?

Touche! There are other landing page analyzers/graders/calculators available, but we can confidently say Unbounce’s is the most sophisticated and comprehensive you’ll find. Ours is the only landing page analyzer on the market leveraging AI technology, and the endless amount of campaign research done by our customers and our in-house marketing team.

For the past eight years, we’ve been obsessed with the question “what’s a good conversion rate?”, and Unbounce’s internal research team has employed proprietary AI technology to analyze the behavior of over 75 million visitors to 65,000 landing pages with a goal of understanding what makes a customer convert.

We have more data than any other conversion platform to provide insights on what a high-performing landing page looks like, and The Analyzer leverages this insight.

The Analyzer’s data is sourced from Google Page Speed Insights, and our very own proprietary data broken down by industry.

Actionable feedback you can implement today

The best thing about this landing page review? You’ll discover instant improvements that might take you only minutes to fix.

The Wizard of Moz himself, Rand Fishkin ran the following product’s landing page from Moz.com through The Analyzer and had some great things to discover.

How’d this Moz page fare? Here are Rand’s initial thoughts:

“I’m glad to see we passed so many of the technical checks! I was a little nervous. [I] Realized that the page is missing testimonials or social proof. That’s a head-smacking moment.”

Rand may be a bit self-depreciating here, however. Moz’s page scored really well with a 75% overall:

Rand’s overall landing page grade.

Rand’s verdict on trying out The analyzer?

“I’ve never seen a page analysis tool that’s focused on optimization. In my opinion, this can be hugely helpful for folks to quickly check that they’ve nailed the basics of landing page optimization and accessibility. I have no doubt tens of thousands of websites can get better just by applying this tool’s advice.”

What did we learn?

Interested in what The Analyzer could teach us about our in-house landing pages at Unbounce, we ran our recent event landing page for PPC Week through to see what we’d take away:

Pictured: The landing page for PPC week we input into the Landing Page Analyzer.

We learned the page converts very well for our industry (7.7%), and while the page loads pretty quickly (0.7 seconds), at 3.32MB it’s overweight and could be loading even quicker if we reduce it to less than 3MB:

Fortunately, The Analyzer also provided us with some compressed images that will help us load up to 9% faster:

We also saw that our page title, meta description and H1 tags were helping our SEO visibility (which was important for this particular page).

All of these quick-to-change factors can improve this PPC Week page for us, but we’re most excited to see what you’ll discover about your own landing pages. Bonus, you don’t need an Unbounce-built page to try The Analyzer, either. Give it a try today and let us know what you think!

When you hear ‘website popup’ in a marketing context, my bet is—as a discerning marketer—you all but cringe. Surely these boxes that jump up in the middle of a screen are for low-level marketers. They’re scammy, make you lose your train of thought, nobody likes them,…you’d never use ‘em.

But can you really hate popups if they’re found to drive results?

As heated as the debate can get, Richard Lazazzera, an ecommerce entrepreneur and Content Strategist at Shopify has a fair point in this reply to a comment on his blog post:

Image via the Shopify blog.

And drive sales they can.

By experimenting with popup overlays, Sydney-based Canvas Factory (an ecommerce shop providing high-quality canvas prints) has found a ton of success engaging prospects at exactly the right time.

Using just one popup that appears across several of their domains, Canvas Factory discovered the targeting that worked best for them, and—most importantly—brought in 1.1 million USD in revenue(!) via their offer.

In today’s post, we’ll share Canvas Factory’s story, along with some lessons learned, so that—if you’re tempted—you too can convert more site visitors.

Canvas Factory’s approach to ecommerce popups

Similar to many ecommerce brands, Canvas Factory wanted to convert more of the visitors leaving their site empty handed. They’d realized some prospects only needed a moderate incentive to get over any purchase anxiety, so they had started offering a small discount via a coupon.

Eventually they wondered if the coupon would perform even better if delivered via a popup at the right moment.

They duplicated this one design eight times for running across different domains on certain URLs. The copy was the same for each, offering $10 off someone’s first order in exchange for an email, and only appeared as someone was actively trying to leave the site, once per visitor.

The main difference was location. The brand ran four of these overlays across their product pages on their Australian and New Zealand domains, while another four appeared on the Canvas Factory blog across the same domains.

How’d the experiment go?

The Unbounce popup overlay has now been running from November 2016 to present and in comparing the period before using the popups to promote this same coupon code to now:

Canvas Factory has seen a 6% to 9% increase in use of the coupon, and

Subscription to their mailing list has grown by over 14.3%.

Now the brand’s marketers can do a better job actively nurturing prospects claiming the coupon, and re-marketing to successful first-time customers.

But in terms of the bottom line? Managing Director Tim Daley says it best:

“Unbounce played a key part in Canvas Factory’s conversion rate optimization activity for our subscriber campaign. This has contributed to over $1.1 million dollars in purchases.”

$1.1 million the brand may not have otherwise seen had they not tried the overlay? If that’s not making you reconsider whether or not your personal distaste for popups should stop you from trying one out, I’m not sure what will.

That said…

How’d the brand track success?

Tim tells us the coupon use was measured by integrating Unbounce popup overlays with their mail platform and their payment gateway CS-Cart:

“This [integration] allows us, per country level, to collect new subscribers, partition [them] to relevant country and then track their individual and group purchase application of the coupon acquired through the popup.”

Ultimately the integration lets Canvas Factory see:

How many customers are using coupons + how many discounts are being used total

Total revenue before and after coupons are applied

Average order value before and after coupons are applied

What kind of customers the brand’s attracting with coupons

All very useful factors in understanding how long a campaign like this is feasible for, and experimenting with different discounts.

Want to push your lead data collected via landing pages, sticky bars, and popup overlays through to your mail platforms and other tools? See our Integrations Powered by Zapier and all the connections available right in Unbounce.

It’s all about location: A lesson on why popups in the wrong place are a big mistake

Your gut feeling that popups can be scammy? It’s not far off. If used incorrectly at the wrong time or on the wrong URL of your site, they certainly can be. We’ve all seen these types of popups and they’re maddening.

In Canvas Factory’s case, it wasn’t as simple as create the popup, set it and forget it. In running their Unbounce popup overlay in several locations, they’ve learned placement and timing is critical.

In Tim’s case, he discovered that the blog wasn’t the proper placement for this particular offer, it was simply too soon in the buyer journey to be offering someone a discount. With posts on the brand’s blog aimed to help you take better photos of your kids and other photography tips, this level of awareness doesn’t really align with wanting to purchase right away.

Overall, Canvas Factory’s blog popup conversion rate was 0.18% versus the up to 11% conversion rate they’d seen on product pages where the purchase intent was likely higher.

As outlined above, aim to align your offers with buyer intent.

The lesson:

If you choose the right place for your offer (pricing pages and high commitment URLs in Canvas Factory’s case), you’ll see results because you offered a timely and relevant incentive. In the wrong place, however, you simply won’t see the results you want, and worse, you’ll irritate and annoy your visitors.

So you shouldn’t use popups on your blog?

No—Canvas Factory’s unique experience isn’t to say that popups on your blog won’t work, because they definitely can. You just have to choose the right kind of offer and perfect targeting. Because your blog readers may not be product aware yet, you need to align your offer with the level of awareness readers do have about your company (i.e. they might be open to a free in-depth ebook about the exact topic they’re already reading about).

You might also try directing your blog traffic to an even higher-converting area of your site.

Here’s a super relevant clickthrough popup Seer’s Wil Reynolds uses to offer up more relevant content on his site:

By proactively serving up what prospects might want next, Seer becomes more trustworthy and keeps people engaged on their site longer (which is a great sign in Google’s eyes). You can make traffic shaping like this the goal of some of your popups in locations where a higher-commitment ask doesn’t make sense.

Try an Experiment Yourself

Overall, popups can definitely be annoying when used aggressively or poorly (there’s no arguing that) but, as we’ve seen with Canvas Factory, proper targeting and relevant offers can make all the difference to both marketers and site visitors who can be receptive to proper incentives at the right time.

If you’ve got a great campaign or offer running, a well-timed and targeted popup could ensure all the right people see it and that you don’t leave opportunities on the table.

]]>http://unbounce.com/lead-generation/ecommerce-popup-helped-generate-1-million/feed/2Don’t Settle. Build the Marketing Campaigns of Your Dreams Without a Line of Codehttp://unbounce.com/campaign-strategy/build-the-marketing-campaigns-of-your-dreams-without-code/
http://unbounce.com/campaign-strategy/build-the-marketing-campaigns-of-your-dreams-without-code/#commentsThu, 02 Nov 2017 07:00:23 +0000http://unbounce.com/?p=66195/

Hi, I’m Corey. Are you an idealistic marketer, like me?

That is—do you plan your marketing campaigns by pretending technical limitations aren’t a thing and just map out the ideal experience you want for your prospects from first impression to final conversion? Like this:

After us idealistic marketers are done dreaming about our perfect campaign structure from start to finish, the harsh reality sets in: technical limitations are definitely a thing. When the time comes to figure out how to actually do something a little crazy, like augment lead data or enrich it with extra data pulled from ‘the internet’, things get much trickier. But if you’re dedicated to the campaign you mapped out, you really want to make it happen.

Often, you’ll ask a developer for help and hear, “Sure it’s possible. I’ll just need two weeks to code it up. Log a request and we’ll prioritize it against all the other requests for my genius.”

We both know you’re not logging that request, because it’s not getting prioritized.

Eventually, you run a campaign that looks exactly like what you’ve done before, or what everyone else is doing, because it’s relatively easy for us—lowly marketers—to pull off by ourselves.

It’s infuriating.

Can’t we Execute More Sophisticated Marketing?

Is it too much to ask that we can create whatever the hell we dream up, so we can push the industry forward? To deliver the experience we think could make a difference to our prospects—one they might even enjoy?

Not if we need to rely on devs to help build our lead management or the integrations component of our campaigns for us, unfortunately.

However, I’ve found that more and more often I don’t need to have these futile conversations with developers. Modern martech has brought us tools to help, and the tool that comes up most often for me is Zapier.

Your Marketing on Zapier

Have you ever punched above your weight at work and solved a problem that that you’re totally unqualified to solve? It. feels. so. satisfying. You feel way smarter than you actually are.

I got that feeling when I used Zapier with Unbounce for the first time. I still get that feeling today. If you dream big enough, and can connect the right tools together, you can pull off campaign workflows that feel almost impossible.

Exactly how I felt having used Zapier for the first time.

Most recently, I tried to execute the campaign in the whiteboard photo above (the one above the Dragonball Z meme). The campaign—called Conversion Quest—challenges PPC marketers working in agencies to double the conversion rate of one of their client’s landing pages in 30 days.

When planning this campaign, I wanted to have a prospect fill out the form on a landing page with the current date (when they were “starting their quest”), and their current conversion rate. From there, they’d receive an email confirming their personalized quest goal and deadline by which they’d ideally complete the challenge (The email was to automatically pull in someone’s target conversion rate and their custom due date a month out).

Of course, when I’d planned this flow, there was no technical way to magically include a doubled conversion rate and custom due date directly in each prospect’s followup message. That is until my colleague reminded me of Zapier Formatter, which allows you to manipulate your lead data before it goes into your marketing automation platform (or CRM, or Email Marketing Service, or wherever other tool you can think of). Just 30 minutes later (and without approaching our dev team), I had augmented data going into our marketing automation platform.

Now Conversion Quest runs with custom info in the followup, all thanks to a quick Zap (a preconfigured integration template connecting two or more apps).

Here’s an example of the message I send in that campaign:

Here’s a sample of the email I manipulated data with via Zapier to personalize.

Now, are you going to need to use Zapier so you can build Conversion Quest?

No (that’s my great idea)… But my bet is you’ve got amazing campaign ideas for which Zaps could help you create a consistent (better!) experience for your leads, and help you stop relying on developers. As a bonus, Unbounce now has Integrations Powered by Zapier available right in the builder, so you can do this super quickly, without ever leaving Unbounce.

Here’s just a sampling of the Zaps available right in Unbounce. There are 60+ right in app, and with a Premium Zapier account you can access over 900!

Let’s dig into the versatility for a second.

Leveling up your marketing (without a line of code)

In this case, you’re a marketing agency that needs to build high-converting lead gen landing pages, overlays or sticky bars that connect to anything and everything your clients use, which could include:

Hatchbuck

Base

Follow Up Boss

Agile CRM

Pipedrive

Salesforce

HubSpot CRM

Capsule CRM

PipelineDeals

A few quick Zaps can connect your lead data to all of the above.

2. You want to use an existing CRM or marketing automation platform, with custom landing pages/Unbounce

If you’re using a tool that requires you to use rigid forms or landing pages, but you’d rather have custom landing pages that look great, convert like crazy and give you more control over the experience, you’d simply Zap together your landing page builder with tools/platforms like:

With Integrations Powered by Zapier, if you collect a lead in Unbounce, Zapier can enrich the lead’s profile with extra data (using, for example, the lead scoring Zap) en route to wherever you’re storing your leads.

4. Your sales team would like to be notified immediately when a super qualified lead comes in…but they never check their email

For this, you can try sending notifications via the following Zaps:

SMS integration

Slack

Twitter

LinkedIn

5. You’d like to route leads to specific salespeople in your CRM depending on the info a prospect submits in a form

Joe Savich from Altos gave this a try in Unbounce, and had high praise for this email parser Zap:

“It’s pretty nice. The integration powered by Zapier was super easy to setup…I was able to create a lead notification with a condition that, depending on which custom field was chosen, would send that lead to the appropriate sales team. My client thinks I am a magician! I could see this being used a lot going forward.”

Overall, of all the feature releases in my 4 ½ years at Unbounce, Integrations Powered by Zapier is my all time favourite. Zaps from right inside our builder empower marketers to do things you shouldn’t be able to do, without developers. And they make you feel really smart.

If you’re committed to driving our industry forward with some next-level marketing (that may look impossible at first glance), I’d urge you to try zapping some connections together and getting creative. You might surprise yourself, or better yet your boss or clients.

As an Unbounce blog reader, you already know conversion rate optimization is a great way to drive more results from the money you’re already spending to acquire traffic to your site. So today I’d like to focus on another way to make more money from your marketing efforts; namely, ad optimization.

After a decade of building AdWords at Google, I cofounded Optmyzr because I found it was too time consuming to run best practice optimizations. And — considering that last year over $35 billion was spent advertising on Google (more than twice what was spent on Facebook) — there is tremendous value in making AdWords perform even a little bit better.

While there are many ways to improve your ad performance, one of the most pertinent is to improve your Quality Score (QS), particularly the subcomponent, landing page quality (LPQ).

But before I get into how to improve your Quality Score via landing pages, here’s some behind-the-scenes context based on my time at Google.

What is Google Quality Score?

One of the teams I worked on for seven years while at Google was the Quality Score team so I’ve written extensively on the topic. For a primer, here are some of my favorites:

Ultimately, Quality Score is Google’s way of using collective wisdom of many searchers to measure the relevance of a keyword. In short, it’s a measure of how good of a job you’re doing providing people with search queries with strong answers.

This is important because if you are the best answer to someone’s query with your ad and resulting landing page, Google gives you your clicks for less money because you’re helping provide a better user experience, which makes Google more money.

Quality Score impacts ad rank and costs

It’s fairly well known that Quality Score is one of the factors that determines Ad Rank. The other factors are the bid and the impact of ad extensions.

When you improve any of these three components, your Ad Rank increases, which leads to one of two possible outcomes:

You win a better ad position (but pay the same or more for improved placement on the page), or

The position of your ad remains the same, but you get a discount and pay less for any clicks you get.

In short: You can get a discount on AdWords by making your ads (and corresponding landing pages) more relevant!

This is because the CPC you pay is only part of what determines how Google makes more money.

Ad Rank now vs. then

To deepen your understanding of AdWords, I find it useful to take a quick trip down memory lane about the ad auction. Ad Rank used to be calculated like this:

Ad Rank (circa 2002) = Max CPC * CTR

Notice that Ad Rank is actually Cost Per Mille (CPM or cost per thousand impressions) in this equation! Over time, Google started to use a predicted rather than historical CTR, so we changed how we explained the formula and introduced the concept of Quality Score so we could stop talking about pCTR (predicted CTR).

Ad Rank = Max CPC * pCTR → Ad Rank = Max CPC * QS

Then we refined the algorithm to deal with some weird edge cases and rather than just multiplying the factors, the formula became more advanced. We communicated it as follows:

Ad Rank (today) = function (Bid, QS, Extensions)

With this historical context, we see that the ad auction is basically a CPM auction where the way the CPM is calculated has evolved over time.

So even though advertisers place CPC bids, Google is awarding the best ad positions to advertisers who deliver the best CPM for Google (aka: those who provide more relevant ads that get the most clicks).

How Quality Score can reduce CPCs

As an example to show how this discounting of CPCs really works, let’s say there are two advertisers, Julie and Robert and they both bid a max CPC of $1. However they have different Quality Scores, a 5 and a 10.

Bid

QS

Ad Rank

CPC

Robert

$1

10

10

$0.51

Julie

$1

5

5

$1 (or the auction minimum)

As you can see, Robert (who’s winning the auction) actually pays a lower CPC than Julie, because his Quality Score is better.

This classic example oversimplifies the calculation of the CPC, however. For the example to be correct, we’d have to say that Robert’s CTR is twice that of Julie, and not just that his Quality Score number is twice that of Julie’s.

That’s because the visible QS number (between 1 and 10) is based on a non-linear assignment of a visible number to an underlying prediction of relevance.

To calculate the rank and CPC, Google uses a real-time prediction of CTR based on as many as hundreds of factors.

Real time Quality Score vs visible Quality Score

The Quality Score number between 1 and 10 that you see next to each keyword is simply an indicator and can be used to help prioritize what to optimize. After optimizations, it can be used to determine if improving relevance was achieved.

However, this number is NOT what is used in the Ad Rank formula.

Some indicators have more precision than others and there are also indicators that are linear and some that are not (the visible QS indicator is not necessarily linear).

The speedometer in a car and the signal strength bars on your cell phone are both linear, but the former is more precise than the latter. As you drive faster, your speedometer goes up precisely to tell you that you’ve increased speed. The bars on your cell phone, however, may take a while to go from one bar to two bars even though the signal strength has been gradually increasing for a while. Visible Quality Score is more like the phone’s signal strength indicator, except that there are 10 levels.

Articles claiming you can reduce your cost by 50% by doubling your QS number are oversimplifying, but they still make a valid point: that better Quality Score will lead to lower costs (assuming no jump in position).

The only way to reduce your CPC by half is by doubling your predicted CTR.

What factors go into Quality Score?

As an AdWords marketer, you want to get yourself a better Quality Score and a lower cost per click. There are several factors that go into Quality Score so let’s take a look at what those are:

Ad relevance

Expected CTR

Landing page experience

Ad relevance

Ad relevance is an indicator of how well your ad text matches your keywords.

It’s usually a good idea to include the core concept of the keyword in your ad text, and to also include some compelling unique value propositions that will make your ad stand out from competitors. Over the years I’ve personally noticed that even minor changes in word choice can have drastic impacts on how well the user understands the ad.

For example, when eBay changed their ads to say, “buy it on eBay” instead of, “find it on eBay.” Because the word “buy” implies ecommerce, this got a far better CTR than the word ‘find’ which didn’t directly suggest one could buy the desired item.

Expected CTR

Expected CTR is an indicator of how likely your ad is to be clicked.

At the most basic level, this requires choosing good, relevant keywords, and grouping them in logical ad groups so that you can write compelling ads that get users to click.

Landing page relevance

Landing page relevance indicates how well your landing page meets the needs of users, and there are many ways you can go about improving this.

As an example, Joe Khoei from PPC agency SalesX (where I serve on the board) says that using Dynamic Text Replacement on Unbounce landing pages for the Children’s Learning Adventure helped his client increase conversion rates (calls and form fills) from 1.4% to 3.3% over 8 months.

Generally, using personalization features like DTR will correlate to better Landing Page Quality (LPQ) because users are getting what they want and that is what Google wants too: happy users who continue to engage with ads.

In this example of a landing page for a music school, the instrument type is swapped out depending on which ad is clicked.

There’s an interesting tug of war between motives of landing page optimization; an optimization for conversion rate could hurt Quality Score, and Quality Score optimization could decrease conversion rates.

The trick is to find that right balance, and ideally aim to optimize where both QS and CR improve. Fortunately, they’re not mutually exclusive outcomes.

How to better track your Quality Score improvements

Once you make optimizations to your ads or landing pages with the goal of improving Quality Score, you’ll need to track if the changes are working. In this stage it’s critical you don’t lose sight of the bigger picture, which is to grow your business.

No executive ever said their goal for the company was to improve their QS next quarter. So remember, it’s a useful gauge to see if you could lower costs, but it’s not a business KPI.

Up until fairly recently, the easiest way to track changes in QS required using an AdWords Script, or signing up for a tool like Optmyzr, but now the data is also available directly in AdWords.

To get at the daily variations in AdWords, you have to do a few things:

Use the old interface. The new one doesn’t include subcomponents yet.

Look at the data with the segmentation for “day” turned on. Simply looking at the QS between two compared date ranges doesn’t get you the daily data because both fields will show the ending value.

To see how your QS has evolved based on changes to your landing pages, turn on the landing page component in the AdWords interface and then download the data with a daily segment.

You’ll end up with columns like this:

After exporting this data, you can use a simple spreadsheet formula that compares the current value to the historical one, e.g. =IF(A2=B2,1,0), so that the field will contain a 1 if the value has remained the same.

From there, filter these out and you’ll see only instances where the LPQ has changed. This will help you see where optimizations to your landing pages are positively affecting LPQ as a subfactor in Quality Score.

The purpose and importance of landing page quality

Landing page was the last component to be added to Quality Score and I was still on the team when we made this change. We had come to realize that it was too easy for advertisers to game the system by writing must-click ads, but then lead the user to a not so spectacular landing page, and in some cases even to a scammy site.

We had to start looking at what happened after the click, so we used both manual processes with the policy team and automated ones through the QS indicator to find sites that weren’t delivering a great experience.

What matters for landing page quality?

Here are some of the things Google cares about for landing pages:

The page needs to deliver what the ad promises

The user’s privacy and personal information must be protected

The page should be transparent about its purpose

The landing page should let users freely navigate the web

The page should load quickly

Deliver what the ad promises

The first part should be the easiest to abide by. After all, if you want to drive conversions, you should be doing CRO and you should take users to landing pages that are relevant to what you offer in your ads.

Protect the user’s privacy

Privacy gets a little trickier.

What Google wants here is that you don’t share user’s information with third parties without their permission. So if you’re collecting leads and reselling these, you could be running into LPQ issues.

Be transparent about the page’s purpose

This also rolls into transparency.

If you’re a middleman, you need to be upfront about that. Affiliates who create thin landing pages and doorway pages are likely to run into LPQ issues because they usually add very little value and yet force the user to go through an extra step to get to where they wanted to go in the first place.

Allow users to freely navigate

Providing options is another tricky one for advertisers who deploy landing pages for their ads rather than taking the user to the most relevant page on their site. At issue here is that the user can do only do two things on most of these pages: instantly convert, or go away. Even a user who is interested in what you offer may not reach the comfort level needed to submit their info right away and if they can’t find more info by browsing the main site, their only real option is to go away and that is seen as a bad thing by Google.

While it can be a best practice to have a classic landing page perform only one goal and not include navigation or distractions, what I’m advocating for here is that you consider the allocation of your paid spend to a combo of the right, most relevant pages (whichever they may be).

That is – consider for each keyword or ad group which page on your site (or which landing page) may be best to serve up for a given situation. You may be pointing paid traffic to a landing page that is too high commitment for someone at the top of the funnel and this could hurt your Quality Score if someone’s only option is to convert or bounce. It’s a matter of their perceived readiness.

To ensure you’re not penalized this way, get strategic and point your paid traffic to highly relevant pages, either on your site, or build more valuable, relevant landing pages for each stage of the buying process to access via your ads. By having especially relevant landing pages that present the right offer at the right time, you should be able to avoid the issue of options as visitors will be served up the right option for them on their journey.

Again, if you have a great offer, and a decent site, the idea is that users should be able to get all their questions answered before being asked to turn over their details.

Landing page speed

And finally, the speed of your landing page is very important as a factor Google considers.

Just know Google is not actually that stringent and so long as your landing page is not an outlier in terms of slowness, you’ll be fine.

But you should still care tremendously about load times because as a 2017 study by Akamai found, a 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7 percent and a two-second delay in web page load time increase bounce rates by 103 percent.

Google’s Group Product Manager for AdWords, Jon Diorio, recently shared a stat from SOASTA that a 1 second delay in landing page load times can decrease retail conversion rates by 20%.

Pay close attention to signals about whether landing page visitors are satisfied

When I was at Google and I gave presentations at industry events about Quality Score, someone would always ask how we measured landing page quality. While I couldn’t answer that question directly then, and still can’t today, I recommend that you pay close attention to signals like bounce rates and time on site.

Google Analytics is a great way to track these signals which are fundamentally a measure of how satisfied users are with your landing pages.

If a user sees an ugly page, a page that takes too long to load, or one that seems off topic for what the ad promised, they will use the back button and try their luck at the next site.

Whether you’re using Unbounce or not, you are hopefully already paying close attention to these things. After all, this is part of CRO. If a user doesn’t stay long enough to consider your offer, they surely won’t have time to convert and your cost for the click to get them to your page will have been wasted.

These days the average marketer has been cited to use anywhere from 12 to a whopping 31 tools to build the campaigns of their dreams, but making sure all of these different apps or tools work together like a well-oiled machine is often where things get messy.

For example, you might generate leads via your landing pages, but — depending on your marketing stack and the connections you’ve set up — it’s not always easy to automatically pass, tag and strategically route form data you’ve collected into all the different tools you need to work in (i.e. you might be using Google Sheets for lead tracking, your CRM for sales follow-up, and your marketing automation platform for triggering especially relevant email campaigns).

Maintaining a simple workflow for your lead management is next to impossible if your tools don’t connect and talk to each other properly.

Luckily, all the tools you love can talk to each other

Today at Unbounce, we’re excited to introduce our new Integrations Powered by Zapier.

Now, you can instantly connect your landing page, overlay and sticky bar lead data to over 60+ apps without typing a line of code or ever leaving the Unbounce builder.

What’s Zapier?

If you’re not already a super fan, Zapier’s the tool over one million people use to connect their favorite web apps together for less busywork and more impressive automation. It’s like the one integration to rule them all – or the tool that makes all the other tools hold hands and play nice.

We’ve seen thousands of Unbounce customers build landing pages, overlays and sticky bars, then set up custom integrations with Zapier to funnel lead data into their other favorite tools like Intercom, Go2Webinar, Autopilot and Salesforce, for example. Today that connection’s even easier.

Goodbye busywork, hello automation

Acting as a handy lead gen concierge, the new Integrations Powered by Zapier help eliminate mundane setup tasks.

With pre-built Zap templates directly in Unbounce and the usual integration set-up tasks automated for you, Zapier helps you get centralized lead management for any campaign in just a few clicks.

Even better? Zapier is a trade secret for leveling up the sophistication of your marketing. Using Zaps to connect your lead generation data with other tools and automate more actions, you can set up elaborate campaigns without needing to build workarounds or “hacks,” or depend on dev resources to build your integrations for you.

The possibilities are endless, but here’s a taste of how a few of our customers are already using this feature to fuel impressive campaigns without relying on IT.

Zap inspiration #1: Enrich your lead data

It’s one thing to generate new leads, it’s another if they get routed to your sales team pronto with extra context (like a lead’s unique preferences) included.

Joe Savitch, SEM and Inbound marketer at digital agency Altos, recently launched a lead gen campaign with a real estate client and wanted leads’ properties of interest included in the info submitted via the form (without the lead having to select manually from a drop down). In knowing which properties leads were expressly interested in, the real estate client’s sales team could follow up with especially relevant outreach.

Not only was Joe able to identify each lead’s specific interest using a lightbox that passed a value from the button to the lead form, but with Unbounce’s new Integrations Powered by Zapier (the “Email Parser” Zap), Joe created a lead notification that routed leads to the appropriate sales team based on which custom field had been chosen:

And here’s an example of the lead notification his team receives:

A sample of the lead notification Joe has automatically sent to the sales team via the Zap. Properties of interest are noted here for the sales team.

Joe’s verdict?

The Integration Powered by Zapier was super easy to setup and execute… My client thinks I am a magician! I could see this being used a lot going forward.

Zap inspiration #2: Get visibility into campaign ROI

Serving many small to medium sized clients, Stefano Apostolakos of digital agency Webistry notes that many of the brands they work with don’t have, or aren’t familiar with sales CRM tools, meaning the agency can have a hard time demonstrating the ROI of the lead gen campaigns they run.

But now, thanks to the PipeDrive Zap directly in Unbounce, all of Webistry’s campaign leads get pushed into PipeDrive (a sales CRM), tagged and positioned appropriately in a client’s sales funnel.

Stefano’s team then runs monthly reports to discover which campaigns, ad groups and keywords achieve the highest CPA (cost per acquisition) to show the client just how valuable the new campaigns have been. Here’s what Stefano had to say about it:

Our customers have been very excited to see the direct impact their campaigns have on the bottom line. Being able to prove the value we bring has helped us to build loyalty, and generate an extensive portfolio of happy, long-term customers.

Want to set up a Zap to better see your ROI? To use Integrations Powered by Zapier, you’ll need a Zapier account and Unbounce. Learn more here.

Go forth and Zap!

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. While Unbounce now contains 60+ Zap templates to choose from right in the builder to get you started, if you have a Premium Zapier subscription, you’ll have access to over 900+ app integrations via Zapier you can make use of in Unbounce.

Whether you want to use one Zap at a time, or go wild with a few at a time (i.e. lead data pushed into Google Sheets, Slack, LinkedIn and more…), today you can finally manage, tag, and re-route all the leads you collect with Unbounce (from right in Unbounce). The only limit is your imagination.

You’ll simplify your campaign workflows, and all of your tools will run smoothly together. Not to mention, you can run far more complex campaigns without the help of IT.

We’re psyched to be the first conversion platform to make Zapier integrations available directly in the builder, and we can’t wait to see what you Zap together.

]]>http://unbounce.com/product/new-integrations-powered-by-zapier/feed/4Google Is Leaving You Clues to Help You Rank Higher – Know Where to Lookhttp://unbounce.com/seo/google-is-leaving-you-clues/
http://unbounce.com/seo/google-is-leaving-you-clues/#commentsMon, 16 Oct 2017 07:00:24 +0000http://unbounce.com/?p=65870/

Google is leaving you clues about how to become a better marketer — and you might not even be seeing them.

The job of every marketer today, whether they work in PPC, SEO, CRO, or content, is to solve people’s problems. Google is taking note of companies that are doing it well, and companies that are leaving people disappointed.

Search engine optimization is changing

With the help of AI, machine learning and years of data, search engines are getting better at predicting what people want.

At the recent Call to Action Conference, Seer Interactive founder Wil Reynolds explained that as search engines become more concerned with solving people’s problems, the old SEO toolset is going to be thrown for a curve:

My bet is on people signals in the algorithm becoming how we’re going to see ourselves ranking better and better. Google’s algorithm is going in a direction of better understanding what people want.

In other words, the search race is no longer simply about keywords — it’s about being a trusted brand committed to solving people’s problems.

Find clues to solve prospects’ problems

The good news is there are a few places you can start looking to see what your customers want, so you can then deliver.

Here are two places Wil suggests any marketer can look to better solve their customers’ problems and start seeing better results.

Pssst. Go hereto watch the full recording of Wil’s talk at the 2017 Call to Action Conference: Breaking the Silo Between CRO and SEO to Make BIG Wins.

Clue #1: Comparison search queries

When your future customers are in the evaluation stage of their journey, they’re likely comparing you with your competitors. They’re typing in things like “best,” “compare” and “reviews.”

These keywords indicate that they’re not necessarily sold on you yet — they’re looking for a comparison. Knowing this, how can you discover exactly what they want so you can serve it up for them?

Examine the top organic results

Looking at the top organic results will give you better insight into what people actually want to see.

In the example Wil provided of a search query for “best CRM software,” all of the top paid results are companies, while the top organic results are comparisons:

The discrepancy in the type of organic content that is being shown versus the type of content in the ads tells us the paid content isn’t directly solving the problem people are searching for.

This gives smart marketers a hint that when people use search terms like “best,” they aren’t ready to be sold to. Instead, they’re looking for content that directly compares vendors or brands and allows them to come to their own conclusion about what “best” really is.

Or as Wil put it:

When you want to rank on Google for something organically, they make you solve that person’s problem… but if you are willing to give them money, they’ll just let you show up for it all day long.

Now that you know what your customers are actually looking for, what’s next?

Create content that replicates those top organic results

The image below shows what one of the top organic results looked like for “best CRM software”:

By creating this comparison chart, they’re giving their potential customers the kind of content they’re looking for at this point in their buyer journey.

Notice that HubSpot actually ranked themselves second in the chart. What kind of marketer would say they’re second best? Bold!

We typically see marketers shouting, “We’re #1!” from the rooftops so consumers constantly feel like they’re be sold to. In this case, as Wil points out, HubSpot is taking a risk by not claiming to be #1. But they’re putting the needs of the customer first, which consumers are sure to love — and Google, too.

Answer customers’ questions instead of just shoving them into your funnel. Google will thank you.Click To Tweet

Clue #2: “People Also Ask” box

Google’s “People Also Ask” box is a goldmine of information for anticipating what your customers will be searching for next.

The “People Also Ask” feature, introduced in 2015, is an expandable box of search queries related to the original search. Each question can be expanded by clicking on it, which gives the user options to refine their search or dig deeper on the subject:

“People Also Ask” boxes create an infinite source of related questions, in this case all about pizza.

This feature can tell smart marketers several things about how users are searching and creates an opportunity to solve their customer’s problems in more places.

How can you use this clue in your marketing?

Answer more of your users’ questions

Wil explained that when you’re looking for new content ideas, the “People Also Ask” box can be a never-ending source of inspiration.

Start by typing in common search queries for your industry and see what else comes up in the “People Also Ask” box. The suggestions in this box are based on high volume search queries, so they’re a healthy bet for your own content strategy.

The “People Also Ask” box also presents an opportunity to be the leader on any subject. Imagine if you had position 0, position 1, and the “People Also Ask” results? Every user would be led to your content.

The results in the “People Also Ask” boxes are usually results that rank in the first page for that particular search term. To knock out your competitors from these positions, you’ll need to focus on creating high-quality, well-structured and informative content for each search query.

Create a better pop-up experience

Now we’re going to take it a step further beyond creating content on related searches and get into creating content that guides your customer through their journey.

In his talk, Wil explained that “People Also Ask” boxes are giving you cues about how your prospects’ brains work:

“People Also Ask”s are the clues to what people who just searched for [your thing] are going to ask next.

Because the related questions that come up in the “People Also Ask box” are things that other users actually clicked on, you can make assumptions about the kinds of things your customers want to know next.

For example, Seer found that after reading their SEMRush guide, many customers were also asking about comparing SEMRush to Moz.

Seer took this information and created a guide comparing the two tools. They then added a slide-in pop up to their SEMRush guide article, which you can see in the image below, presenting the reader with the option to read the comparison next.

Now a reader doesn’t have to return to Google to find the information they wanted next, because Seer has already presented it to them.

By anticipating what their customers will ask for, Seer is able to keep readers on their site, answer more of their questions and become an even more trustworthy source.

Place ads on trusted sites

We’ve seen that the results in the “People Also Ask” boxes are typically high-quality, informative content that Google already ranks on page 1. This means these sites are highly trusted by Google and they’re showing up for these search queries, so there is a high chance that your customers will visit these websites at some point in their search.

This creates a new opportunity to target your customers with display ads on the sites that you anticipate they will be visiting.

To do this, Wil explained, dig into the “People Also Ask” results to find what sites are coming up as the top answers for all of the queries related to your keyword.

Once you have a list of sites, use Google’s Display planner tool to find those sites and get an idea of how many impressions you’ll get. Then create display ads on the sites that come up most.

Google likes problem solvers

As Google gets better and better at understanding what people want, marketers will need to take an approach that puts solving their customers problems first.

Luckily, Google is already starting to leave clues about what your customers really want to see from your company.

Using these suggestions to start taking action and showing up for your customers at every step of their journey will put you ahead of the curve.

The above info was from Wil Reynolds’ talk from CTAConf 2017. Interested in attending CTAConf 2018? For a limited time, get 10% off the 2 for 1 rate. Enter the code BLOG2FOR1TREAT here to score tickets for only $269.10 each!

Whether you’re an independent realtor or work at a real estate agency, you can gain a competitive advantage if you have owned digital properties to drive your paid and social traffic to.

Owned properties — like landing pages — provide you more control in real estate versus relying on popular listing sites where the journey isn’t always clear, you can’t customize your call to action or match your branding.

In short, real estate marketing can really benefit from lead capture landing pages because they allow you to:

Establish and grow your mailing list, ensuring you can follow up with and remarket to interested prospects later.

1. Showcase your listings (and grow your mailing list)

These independent agents use Unbounce landing pages to showcase an overview of a property: quick stats, a photo gallery, a video and details on the community. And while a property is available, prospects can book a showing as the call to action:

Once the listing is sold (nice work Matthew and Kimbe!), the CTA changes to allow interested parties to sign up for early notice for similar listings in the future:

This post-sale CTA swap is a terrific way to build your email list for advertising similar properties in the future.

Having used the Unbounce Loft template, Matthew and Kimbe can simply duplicate this page each time they need a dedicated place to feature a listing. This allows the duo to be listing-specific when they link from a Facebook or search ad, ensuring a seamless ad-to-landing-page experience for potential buyers.

According to the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report, 41.6% of marketers in real estate have at least one page that converts under 1.3%, so Matthew and Kimbe’s conversion rate above is in line with what we see for many real estate marketers.

See how your conversion rates stack up in real estate (and nine other popular industries)

Booking viewings of individual properties is great, but what if the real estate you’re selling is still in development?

Working with large and small-scale real estate developers, Rennie helps their developer clients plan and execute all aspects of their marketing and sales strategy, including online advertising. As part of their online strategy, they create project-specific landing pages and direct all paid traffic to those pages to gather leads.

Jennie Sebastian, Rennie’s Digital Marketing & CRM Manager, shared that the marketing team typically has a kick-off meeting five to six weeks before a campaign. Once they determine targeting and put together a media schedule, creative — including development of the landing page — can begin.

The campaigns typically employ search ads, display, Facebook, Instagram and WeChat, but the team is always looking for new ways to reach their target audiences.

One of the biggest challenges in online marketing is coming up with a strong call to action that entices users to provide us with their personal information.

Depending on the phase of the project and assets available, CTAs range from, “Sign up now for early access” and “Download all floorplans now,” to “Book a private appointment now.”

Through numerous A/B tests the Rennie team has found that more specific CTAs convert significantly better than more generic ones, as they clearly articulate to a prospect what they are receiving in exchange for their information.

Which brings us to landing page idea number three…

3. Get prospects to picture themselves in their dream home with a virtual tour

Just as Jennie from Rennie told us above, compelling CTAs are very important in real estate marketing, and offering a virtual tour has proven to be very effective for their team:

We recently offered a virtual tour using special 360 degree photography for one of our projects in Calgary. After updating the CTA to “Take a virtual tour now,” we saw a significant increase in the conversion rate.

Here’s an example page of theirs, which converts at 4.15%:

Click the image above to view the full-length landing page.

Clicking the CTA button triggers a form gating the tour:

Even if you can’t wrangle 360 photography, you can still get prospects to picture themselves in their dream home.

Simple videos, photo galleries, or even the hero image on your landing page can do the trick. But be sure to test.

Example test of hero image variants

Here’s an example from Coronation Properties via digital agency Rocket. They test variations of their pages with different key elements of a property featured in the hero image.

Here’s a variant wherein the bedroom is the hero shot:

And another where the kitchen takes the spotlight:

The takeaway here?

Get creative with videos, 360 tours, or even experimenting with your hero shot, to give clients a glimpse into the property that’s right for them.

4. Offer up relevant listings to abandoning visitors

While landing pages clearly offer a competitive advantage in real estate, you also want to ensure you’ve optimized your website for conversions.

As our customers at Brixio know, you can try out an Unbounce overlay to ensure you’re not missing out on conversion opportunities. Overlays allow you to show relevant offers to specific users at the perfect time, making them less likely to leave your website without converting.

We love their idea for an overlay triggered to appear on exit to those leaving a website, tempting potential real estate buyers with off-market or exclusive listings.

This small offer accompanied by all the fine details serves as a type of micro conversion, ensuring Manor Homes’ prospects have the chance to reach out and get the conversation started about a custom home.

Get creative with your own micro conversion incentives! For example, you may want to consider inviting prospects to download a collection of your custom homes to preview at their leisure.

Plenty of businesses use content marketing to reach their target audience, and as Edina Realty knows, this applies to the real estate industry too.

As a subsidiary of Home Services of America, Edina Realty’s licensed pros guide customers through home buying and selling. To provide the most value to their clients, they deliver unique and useful content via custom landing pages.

Check out this Unbounce landing page they created to distribute their Ultimate Guide to Selling Your Home – it converts at a whopping 18%:

Click the image above to view full-length landing page.

By combining content strategy with retargeting, Edina Realty is able to reach prospective leads throughout the funnel and deliver quality leads to their agents.

Hannah Kaeter, Digital Marketing Manager at Edina Realty, told us about the importance of educating leads:

One of the key challenges in our market is a low inventory of homes for sale at lower price points. With this challenge comes an opportunity to educate potential sellers — many of them first-time sellers — about the process so they can evaluate and make informed decisions about their own property and situation.

Ready to build your digital property?

Overall, the above examples illustrate the importance of having a dedicated place to send your paid and social traffic, which can make all the difference in whether you can track the ROI of your real estate marketing. This beats relying on common listing sites — especially in the case of condo developments or offers that require sophisticated branding or high commitment, like custom homes.